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Worldwide Article

Dollar Diplomacy

By Rob Laymon

Rob Laymon is a freelance writer living in Philadelphia. He wrote "Leadership From the Ground Up" in the Nov/Dec 2001 issue.

When a group of eight U.S. senators sponsored the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act this spring, they surprised a lot of people who had called for harsher sanctions against Cuba in light of Fidel Castro's recent human-rights violations. But Sen. Michael Enzi, one of the sponsors of the bill, points out, "The people of [the United States] are our best ambassadors and we should let them show the people of Cuba what we as a nation are all about." He was referring primarily to democracy; but he could just as easily have been talking about the dollars that Americans will bring with them to Cuba-and the seductive luxuries those dollars could bring to the Cuban people.

The dollar has already begun to make its mark in Cuba. You can get a lot of stuff there these days that you couldn't get not long ago-like good rental cars, plush hotels, and modern phone centers from which to call home. You can get a perfectly splendid vacation at a stunning beach resort, complete with rich, creamy sand, water the color of lime Kool-Aid, thatch-roof cabanas at the waterside, and postcards featuring Che Guevara holding a golf club.

Billboards now occasionally advertise products, rather than just the revolutionary slogans and cartoon images of a steamroller flattening Uncle Sam. Television, usually a conveyor of language instruction and mild entertainment, now sometimes touts the charms of driving schools. Cuban cities, ordinarily drab in appearance-or tranquil, depending on your bias-are now showing the first blossom of product-brand color.

Since the mid-1990s, the Cuban government has allowed private citizens who can afford the hefty tax to host visitors in their apartments, thus converting the dwellings to small, part-time hotels. Other homes and apartments become restaurants in the evenings. The number of these have exploded in recent years.

And the tourist industry, seized upon as the economy's savior after the end of Russian aid a decade ago, has actually done a fair amount of saving. Despite the recent wave of headlines about crackdowns on dissenters, tourists from around the world-and perhaps from America, if Sen. Enzi's bill passes-continue to flock to places like Havana and Varadero, a long peninsula where the DuPonts once had an estate. Hotels now cover this peninsula like a creeping vine.

Then there are more subtle indications: For example, Cuban generosity is still very much on display when you walk the streets; people speak and give of themselves freely. But now you get the bite at the end of the conversation-the solicitation, the asking for a tip.

That this dollar prosperity should find itself running afoul of socialist ideals was easy to predict. That it should begin to wreak havoc with Cuba's tender economy is just as expected. Cubans are following the dollar in droves. Professional people find themselves hard-pressed to continue earning their $40 equivalent per month as doctors or lawyers, when they can earn that much per day in the tourist industry. And the black market, long tolerated by the government, has expanded. Cubans now routinely approach travelers with offers of cigars, rum, and sexual favors for sale.

But Cuba is being very careful about this: "taming the imp of the bourgeois," you might call it. The government is gingerly erecting barriers between ordinary Cubans and the will to profit. It puts two prices on any items likely to come into contact with visitors: a peso price for Cubans and a substantially higher dollar price for foreigners. Police are cracking down hard on prostitution and the "escorting" of tourists, and the government has begun to discourage citizens from selling baked goods and other homemade things door to door, as they did to make ends meet during the hard times of the early '90s.

The government has also prohibited Cuban citizens from staying in the country's luxury hotels. The official rationale for this-that Cubans don't know how to behave amid such opulence-rings awfully hollow; clearly, the government wants to spare them any taste of high living.

So the Cubans live in very modest houses and apartments, and the tourists live in splendor-purportedly for the sake of the Cubans. It's an odd situation in a country where, 50 years ago, the disparity between haves and have-nots brought Communism to the island.

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